Sri Lanka - Time for Tea

We left Kandy via a silk shop, where we tried on Saree (or Sari), which were gorgeous and made me wish I lived somewhere where I wouldn’t be stared at for being a white girl dressed in one! We then made a visit to Kandy Botanical Gardens, which could have provided a good half day of entertainment but we were only allotted under 2 hours from our guide. The highlight of the gardens is considered to be the orchid house, with beautiful ornamental flowers from all over the world. The rest of the gardens include avenues of palms and coconut trees, and the unexpected sight of hundreds of bats (Indian Flying Foxes) hanging in the trees like baubles on a Christmas tree – barely a branch was bat-free! Not only were they everywhere, they were awake, chatting and flying from tree to tree like huge black seagulls – quite a sight considering our own UK bats are barely the size of my thumb.

This tree is laden with bats!

Tea is a key export of Sri Lanka and a growing part of the tourist industry. On our way into Sri Lanka’s ‘hill country’ the scenery changed from coconut trees and Buddha statues, to tea plantation as far as the eye could see. We stopped off for a tea factory tour at a plantation owned by a company called Mackwoods and were surprised that it was actually chilly that high up! Despite a whole bush of tea leaves, only the top two leaves and a bud are picked. The leaves are then withered, rolled, fermented and dried. The dried leaves are graded, with the finer tea leaves going to make stronger tea. Our English Breakfast Tea is a fairly fine tea, known as Broken Orange Pekoe, or BOP. We ended our tour with a drink in the tea rooms. Sri Lankans drink Ceylon tea without milk and stew it lightly. Our guide told us that the tea pluckers earn only 500 rupees a day and live in shanties on the edge of the plantations. We saw some of these shanties from the road as we continued our journey – it certainly made me question why people are not prepared to pay more for tea.

 

We arrived at our overnight stop, the Heritance Tea Factory. The hotel is an old tea factory on a still functioning tea estate. We were greeted with a welcome drink of spiced tea and a traditional tea factory welcome of a dot of sandalwood on the forehead and a small handful of sugar, cumin and cardamom to chew. The hotel fully embraced the past of the building, retaining many original features, including a steam engine that was turned on for demonstration every day. The counters in the dining room were mock tea chests and staff dressed in tea factory workers uniform. There were many tea factory relics on show, including several pieces of equipment from Birmingham! The atmosphere of the hotel was fantastic, and what a view to wake up to...  

The next day, we took a visit to ‘little England’, a colonial town called Nuwara Eliya.  We sent postcards home from an old post office and had a look around The Grand Hotel; the oldest hotel in the area that was once the house of the British governor. The hotel was interesting in its grandeur and mock-Tudor architecture, but typically, I was drawn to the environmentally minded quotes hanging on the trees outside:

 

We also passed a waterfall that was huge in height, but with its fall broken by a series of pools. The local people found a range of uses for the waterfall, from washing themselves, to washing their clothes, to just having a great day out!